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Debi's Beautiful Rolls

If you come to my house for dinner, you will almost certainly be served these rolls if you're not served my famous breadsticks. So, to start out with, the original recipe, again from the King Arthur Flour people, is called "Moomie's Beautiful Burger Buns," and is made with all-purpose flour instead of whole wheat and includes an egg, which I don't use because I think the texture of the rolls isn't as good. It also calls for butter, and, interestingly enough, I find that vegetable oil gives a better result. You can certainly use butter if you like. And . . . I use honey instead of sugar, but not because honey is any better for you than sugar. I just like the taste.

Course Bread
Servings 12 more or less
Debi Simons Debi Simons

Ingredients

  • 3 1/4 cups flour*
  • 1 1/4 cups warm water
  • 1/4 cup honey
  • 1/3 cup vegetable oil**
  • 1 tablespoon yeast***
  • 3/4 tsp . salt

Instructions

  1. Dump everything into your bread machine and set it on the "dough" cycle. If you're using instant yeast you can use the "quick dough" setting; on my machine that takes 36 minutes. Watch the dough for the first few minutes to make sure it's doing okay; the moisture needs of dough can vary tremendously with the weather. People get irritated with bread machines because they think that every batch of dough is the same and they should be able to just walk away and let it do its work, but a couple of minutes' watching will tell you if you need more water or more flour. Then you can just let it go.
  2. When the machine beeps, dump the dough out onto a baking sheet that's been sprayed with baking spray. Divide the dough into 12 portions if you're planning to have dinner rolls or more like 9 portions if you want to have hamburger or sandwich buns. You can see from the above picture that I don't worry too much about regularity. Spray the tops of the rolls with more baking spray, cover with plastic wrap, and turn your oven on to 400 degrees. I always use the convection setting on my oven, which automatically lowers the temperature 25 degrees. Either way, let the rolls rise about 15 minutes--again, with instant yeast. Regular yeast may take awhile longer. I've used SAF yeast for so many years that I don't know what other brands do. Apparently "rapid-rise" yeast is not the way to go, but I've found that the instant works beautifully.
  3. When the 15 minutes are up, your rolls should be pushing up against the plastic wrap. Don't let them over-rise. (The original Moomie's recipe says that they should rise for an hour! That's way too long, as far as I'm concerned.) Bake for 8-10 minutes for the smaller rolls; 10-12 minutes for the bigger ones. Let cool on a rack, then pile them up in your bread basket and let the applause begin!

Recipe Notes

*You have three choices for flour here:

1) All-purpose flour

2) Whole-wheat flour bought from the grocery store, but be sure to check the expiration date and keep the flour in your freezer. The reason why people think they don't like whole-wheat flour is that it's often rancid. Since the perishable germ of the wheat kernel is retained, the shelf life of whole wheat flour is much shorter than that of white.

3) Freshly-ground flour from your grain mill. I find that I get double the volume of flour from the wheat, but I've read other sources that say more like 1 1/2 times the volume, so you would need to measure what you get with your wheat and your mill for the first few times. Once you've figured it out, then you don't need to measure the resulting flour. Get the mill going while you measure the rest of the ingredients.

**Easiest way to do this is to use a two-cup Pyrex measuring cup, putting water and honey in first to their respective lines and then sort of guessing where the 1/3 cup of oil goes--it will be a little above the 1 1/2-cup line, say about 1/3 of the way to the 1 3/4-cup line. Exact measurements aren't necessary. Then nuke the whole thing for a minute, stir well, and pour into the bread machine.

***In the past I have used SAF Red Instant yeast from King Arthur Flour,  but their shipping charges have gotten kind of outrageous. They used to base their charges on the actual weight of the item but then changed over to the dollar amount; the shipping on one $5.95 16-oz. bag of this yeast is $6.00. Of course I'd never do it that way; I'd always buy other things, too, but now I see that if I buy two packages of this yeast my shipping goes up to $8.00. Sorry, pals! That ain't gonna happen. Honeyville has it for $10.99 per pound, so I'm still paying about the same with them even with their much lower shipping charges. So, once I used up the SAF yeast I had, I bought some plain old Red Star yeast at Costco, and I think I like it even better. If you do a lot of yeast baking you absolutely don't want to buy those little packets of yeast at the grocery story, as it's very expensive to buy yeast that way.  You can at least buy a jar of yeast there if you don't belong to Costco. (But why don't you?) Keep the bag or jar in your freezer.